Review

Ahh, to hark back to a time
when one of the best
composers in the
business what at his prime
and had no fear of being
replaced or
walking off a picture. With
Varese's re-recording of
maestro John
Barry's inventive, broad and
gentle score to Born
Free, we're
given that glimpse of a time
long forgotten. This CD,
with Frederic
Talgorn conducting the
Royal Scottish National
Orchestra, we hear the
best cross-section of John
Barry in all of his styles than
almost any
score he's ever written. It's
also not exactly the type of
score that
would be written if the same
film was produced today. If
it was done
today, the filmmakers would
try to over-Africanize the
score, while
Barry at this time (1966)
kept it strictly in the
pop-symphonic range
that he was known for at the
time, and in turn helped him
garner his
first Academy Award and
Golden Globe,

I've had the opportunity
to listen to original
soundtrack
recording, which has since
been long out of print, and I
think that
Varese's re-recording is
okay. It has a much better
sound than the
original, which can be
attributed to the newer
recording
technologies. Overall,
Talgorn has stayed true to
the pacing and
sound of the original,
enough so that you could
consider this a
fitting replacement for the
out-of-print version. The
themes, like on
the original, are quite
repetitive after a while. It's a
nice theme,
but how many times can
you rearrange it and still
make it sound
fresh. The main problem I
had getting through the
album (both
versions) was that it was
boring. Granted this is one
of the first
times were Barry used
some of his musical
thematic conventions that
would later appear in his
work on Out Of
Africa, Dances
With Wolves, and a
slurry of James Bond films.
Barry's brass
arrangements are the
prototypes to many of his
mid-series James Bond
scores and his take on
strings and percussion
reminds me of the
"landscaping" cues from
Dances With
Wolves.

On the original
soundtrack, John Barry
teams up with Matt Munro
(Thunderball) again for the
title track on Born
Free, which
was originally removed
from the film's soundtrack.
As Paul Tonk.'s
liner notes specify, that due
to a cover version of the
main title
theme by Roger Williams
went to the top of the U.S.
charts, this
version with Munro was
re-instated back into the
soundtrack of the
film. On the Varese release,
this isn't there, but, there
are several
more cues that didn't
appear on the original
release. A kind of
"tit-for-tat" exchange, if only
to get a complete
representation of
Barry's work on the film.

If you want soothing
music that will put you to
sleep, this will
do it. I do see a reason for a
re-recording of Barry's early
orchestral work, and his
first award garnering on at
that. Much of
this album has to be viewed
in retrospect to the career
that came
after this score was done,
which spans over thirty
years. As an
anticipated and exciting
release, it is not. I'll reserve
that for
the similarly timed release
of Bernard Herrman's
Citizen Kane,
which coincidentally was
his first film score but also
the first of
his to get recognition via an
Academy Award
nomination. When
it comes to anticipation of
soon to be released works
of John Barry,
I look forward to the Bond
re-issues or maybe even
his sci-fi opus,
The Black Hole. I
would hope that this isn't
the start of
looking at a past career, but
one that has a few more
great scores to
come.